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Amber Glow (Confessions of a Wasteland Pony)
Amber Glow is a side character in the audio drama Confessions of a Wasteland Pony. Her story is told by her daughter Amber Horn in the fourth episode, The Engineer. Biography Childhood Amber Glow was a unicorn mare born in Stable 80. From an early age Amber Glow showed a proficiency in technology, specifically programming with the Stable-Tec Spell Matrix Operating System. She would have much time to toy with the software as she would spend much time sick and quarantined in her room. Her older sister Abalone would take care of her and felt a strong protective instinct, especially when their parents died. The "Blue Flu" pandemics (part of the Stable 80 experiment) were wiping out more and more of the population. Most of the adults were dead, with the last of them being wiped out by the "Big Plague." At that point Abalone was 16 years old and the oldest inhabitant of Stable 80. She became the leader by default, but was totally helpless to get the stable door open. They feared the next plague would kill them off completely, they knew they had to get out. Amber Glow, with the help of the Overmare-level permissions Abalone now found herself with, was able to crack the firmware and get the stable door open. They fled Stable 80 and never looked back. Wastelander Abalone struggled to keep the group alive and start a new life for themselves in the Five Highways Wasteland, but they couldn't protect themselves from the slavers. Fast Whip was able to capture them when Abalone was 21 and Amber Glow was 18 years old. At the Oasis Slaver Settlement, they met Sparky. Amber Glow was tasked with helping him convert their Stable 80 pipbucks into bomb collars and the time together fostered a teen romance. At the same time, they both soberly knew that they couldn't give Fast Whip the bomb collars and control that he wanted. With Abalone's help, they launched a slave revolt and successfully killed all the slavers in Oasis. Once on the road, they headed West, far away from Stable 80 and Oasis. During that time, Amber Glow and Sparky grew closer while the three of them became de facto leaders of the group. Eventually, the group were forced to turn South when they couldn't ford the black sludge waters of the River Six. This is when they stumbled upon Mare Island. Amber Glow was able to reverse engineer the EAST Corp technology based on her experience with Stable-Tec terminals. Both of them use spell matrices, so it became a case of simply "learning another language." Once the door to the fortress was opened, they found hostile robots patrolling every building of the facility. These Sentineldroids had to be deactivated one building at a time by severing the building's connection from the main tower and disabling the local alarm. Amber Glow was able to reprogram every building on the island except the main tower. Once she did, she was able to reconnect all the factories and dormitories together onto a new "Surface Network." Because of this, most of the island's functions and robots were under their control. They could make clothes, guns, sprite-bots, tools, spark batteries, and a number of other things. The only things they couldn't were functions carried out by the main tower building: building new sentineldroids, reprogramming sentinel droids, larger weapons for the war balloons, the main communication antenna, the laser batteries on the walls, and the three MARS Guns. Sentinel Regardless, the Sentinels (as they'd begun calling themselves) were well off. For two years there was a baby boom as their collective quality of life had improved exponentially. This included Amber Glow herself, after she and Sparky conceived. This would change one day when a mysterious wastelander, claiming to be an escaped slave, stumbled on the island and came knocking on their door. Amber Glow was the one least enthusiastic about letting him in, but Sparky changed her mind reflecting on his own long life as a slave. Silver Step would turn out to be working for the other slaver groups, his own family threatened if he did not bring back the location of those who escaped Oasis. He took Amber Glow at gunpoint and in the chaos of the confrontation ended up shooting her in the stomach. The bullet wound damaged many internal organs, including the uterus, but Amber Glow opted not to terminate. She instinctively felt that she could not conceive again after the ordeal and didn't want to lose their only child. Unfortunately, Amber Glow would die in childbirth. The baby, while having a yellow coat, had a horn that matched her mother. The doctor guessed it was an anomaly caused by the gunshot trauma. Because of this, Sparky would name their daughter after her... Amber Horn. Amber Glow's legacy would live out in her daughter, as Amber Horn proved to be as brilliant as her parents combined. Amber Horn would be the one to finally crack the Executive Level Encryption and give them control of the main tower and all of Mare Island's systems... though it would be at another great cost. Quotes * "Being enslaved was the last thing either of them wanted to talk about, so they ended up in an in-depth conversation about programming and technology. That’s one thing that has always brought them together. They could just shut out the rest of the world and focus on whatever they were doing with their own horns and hooves. They were never more alive than when they were building something together." - Amber Horn * "That’s how you could tell, even at the very beginning, that they were in love. They ended up working in the shop for hours into the night. My dad, despite his claim, had never seen a PipBuck before. So together they broke one down, and my mother was telling him about every piece. My dad had several Stable-Tec terminals in his workstation that they compared it to. My Aunt Abalone said that they both told her about that first night with the same radiant glow in their eyes. It was an immediate spark, like they were made to be together." - Amber Horn * "Breaking through the executive encryption was something my mom wanted to do for a long time… It was one of the last things she was working on when she died…" - Amber Horn (on part of why she felt so driven to live up to her mom's legacy) Behind The Scenes * The inhabitants of Stable 80, including Amber Glow, were intended to have "Fargo"-like accents. * Amber Glow was intended to be the quiet, deliberate one of the three adult characters. With Abalone being commanding and decisive and Sparky being organizational, the three of them were an effective leadership trio during the first years together as a group. That effective cohesion being destroyed left as much of a vacuum in the society as the loss of Amber Glow did in their hearts. Category:EAST Corp Productions Category:Confessions of a Wasteland Pony Category:Characters Category:Unicorns Category:Characters (Confessions of a Wasteland Pony)